Easy Apple Crumble

Forget complicated dessert recipes! This easy crumble delivers great flavor, with a handful of ingredients. It’s light on fat, big on texture. Yes, it uses sugar, but you can adjust the sweetness down if you’re using sweet apples. 

Don’t have all the ingredients? Don’t sweat it! Variations, cooks notes and substitution suggestions are below the recipe.

Serving suggestions: I’d recommend some vanilla ice-cream or frozen yogurt. If you have cheat meals, this would be it! 

If you try this recipe, I’d love to know! 

Ingredients: 

1 cup muesli or rolled oats

1/2 cup brown rice flour, or flour of choice

2 tbsp sugar 

Salt

3 tbsp flavorless oil (you can use melted butter, if you like)

3.5 cups apple, chopped (I needed 2 large apples)

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 cup sugar (you can adjust down to 1/4 cup, or 2 tbsp if desired)

1/3 cup walnuts

Vanilla extract

Method:

- Preheat oven to 375 degree F. 

- Mix together the muesli (or oats), flour, sugar and salt. Drizzle over the oil and mix until all the flour is moistened. Mixture will look crumbly.

- Combine the apples and cinnamon. Add the sugar, walnuts and vanilla and mix well.

- Top with the muesli mixture.

- Bake on the middle rack for 40-50 minutes or until topping is brown. You might see some delightful ‘bubblage’ from the filling here and there. 

- This smells amazing out of the oven, but the sugar and apple juice will have formed a sticky, super-hot, caramel-y sauce, so cool for 15-20 minutes before serving. Believe me, it’ll still be plenty hot. :-) 

Cooks notes, variations and substitutions: 

Muesli: I really like muesli in this recipe and I like a lot of it. It already includes raisins and some kind of nuts, so less prep work for me. 

If you don’t have muesli, use rolled oats. Even 5-minute oats will do. You can add raisins, walnuts and sliced almonds to that, if you like.

You’ll notice the topping layer is pretty thick. That gives this dessert a beautiful contrast in textures. You can certainly half the ingredients quantities for the topping, if you want a smattering of crunch. 

Brown rice flour: I really like the grainy texture and crunch brown rice flour gives to the topping. But you can use whatever kind of flour you like. Just sub 1/2 cup brown rice flour with 1/2 cup of your flour of choice. 

Flavorless oil: I try to use butter as little as possible in recipes that require fats. Nothing against butter — I like it on toast. But the cholesterol is a bit of a turn off. So I try to use flavorless oils like canola or grapeseed oil when possible. You can certainly use melted butter for this recipe. Butter has a higher moisture content than oil, and the crumble  topping does need fat to succeed. So I’d suggest 4 tablespoons of butter to substitute for 3 tablespoons of oil. 

That’s it for me! Happy baking! 

Amina